And… The Young Protectors‘s donation widget is now live! Special thanks and very warm hugs go out to Barbara B., Ammon T., Chukwudum O. and Virginia H. for starting us off with their generous donations over the last few days! Y’all ROCK!

In other news, as Artifice was wrapping up, some of you were interested in me starting a forum for y’all to discuss my comics but also to have a space to chat about whatever with the awesome members of the community we’ve formed. I’d like to find out if there is still interest in me setting that up. My plate is pretty full with creating future comics, so I’d need a few potential forum moderators to step up—commenters I’ve known for some time whom I could trust to maintain the respectful tone of our discussions. People who could commit to being active moderators for at least six months. But if there’s strong interest in a forum here, I am willing to put in the work setting it up (after my brain stops smoking from this Kickstarter thing… So a couple weeks from now…) Let me know in the comments if that’s something you’d all like and especially if you’d be up for taking on the hours of work of being a moderator.

So! Another page! And like many of the pages before it, not a lot of dialogue on this one… 😀 As a reader pointed out to me on Facebook, whereas a page like this would make this scene feel very quick when read all at once, as a webcomic that updates once a week… well, because it doesn’t move the plot forward much, it can actually make things feel slower and more “decompressed” (even though I don’t think this actually is decompressed storytelling). When you’re updating a page a week, a page chock full of dialogue (or at least several panels) will, I imagine, feel like more of a “meal”.

That said, I’m not sure I’d do anything differently here. Ultimately these pages will be read in one go and this feels like the right pace for that. But I figured it was worth calling out and I certainly appreciate your patience. We’ll be back to my usually wordy panels in couple pages, I promise. 😉